America and the world can’t live with another 4 years of right-wing conservative hypocrisy, divisiveness, lying, secretiveness, and disastrous economic and international policies. That’s why I endorse Obama for President. Get involved, or donate now.
I’m a product strategist and writer. In my day job, I’m Director of Product Strategy at frog design. I also write for Cnet on the Matter/Anti-Matter blog. This is my personal blog and does not represent the views of frog or Cnet. More details >
Interviewed by Jess McMullin of BplusD
Sustainable Design Seminar, Design Management Institute
Design Green Now, Bellingham, WA
Panelist, UT Austin Sustainable Business Summit
The System is the Product / Speaker at Inverge 2007 Conference
The System is the Product / Presentation to Silicon Valley PMA
The Tragedy of the Commons, frog Design Mind
Sunday, October 12 An article in Sunday’s NY Times about the tug of war between eBay and Amazon, which Amazon is currently winning, contains this great quote from Jeff Bezos
Our willingness to be misunderstood, our long-term orientation and our willingness to repeatedly fail are the three parts of our culture that make doing this kind of thing possible.
This crisply summarizes three key mindsets that are essential to thriving with innovation on a consistent basis: don’t listen to your customers literally, have strategic patience, and be willing to make mistakes (as long as you learn from them).
I’ve criticized Amazon in the past for loading too much stuff onto its pages, and that is still the case, and often it seems driven by a corporate case of attention-deficit-disorder. (Sergey Brin has realized that Google has some of the same problem, and is trying to create more focus.) But to its credit, Amazon has not given up trying to innovate, and has clearly embedded that drive into the organization.
Related posts:
google, innovation, management, amazon, jeff bezos, yahoo, ebay, innovation process | IN CATEGORIES... Business, Strategy, Innovation, Management Wednesday, October 1 
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the new Palm Treo Pro, and I was fairly critical of the new smartphone. Why? Basically because I felt that it was good, but that “good” isn’t good enough in today’s dynamic smartphone market. To delve a bit more deeply into this I thought it might be interesting to use the Kano model as some people may not not familiar with this approach.
The model, named after its inventor, Professor Noriaki Kano, provides a simple way to think about how products meet or exceed customer needs, and differentiate themselves against the competition.
The model consists of two axes. On the vertical axis is degree of customer satisfaction. On the horizontal axis is how well the feature or capability was executed, from poorly done/not at all, to very well done.
Onto this we can plot three different types of needs — Excitement, Performance and Basic:
Performance needs: These are primarily quantitative things about technical performance (mpg, 0-60, hold-time on a customer service call), and are often easily articulated by customers and are top-of-mind. For the sake of simplicity this is averaged out to a 45 degree angle - in other words product performance and execution matches customer expectations in a linear manner in a chicken-egg cycle.
Basic needs: Expected features which customers take as a given (and are therefore usually unstated). Having them does not improve your position, but leaving them off results in harsh assesments. Even the best execution on basic needs leaves a “neutral” assessment by a customer. So basic needs have diminishing returns over time, and always stays at or below the horizontal axis.
Excitement needs: These are the “wow” factors that differentiate from the competition by achieving something that customers had never even thought of but which have obvious benefit. Presence of exciters is a big differentiator, but lack of them is not a disappointment as they are not expected. By definition, excitement needs start above the middle point. (If you were to put this in Maslow terms, excitement needs would be further up the pyramid, which in my book doesn’t really make them “needs”, but there you go.)
I wrote a post a couple of years ago riffing off the classic line from This is Spinal Tap - basically the idea being the it’s not always easy to tell when an idea is good or bad, and often the timing of it makes all the difference.
Kano posits the same thing: needs change over time - exciting becomes performance becomes basic.
When telephones first came out, people were ecstatic that they could talk with friends without leaving the house. It didn’t bother them that the phone was attached to the wall and they couldn’t stray more than a couple of feet from it. It just wasn’t necessary to have a cordless handset with a built-in answering machine. These things came along later as the technology matured. But if you tried to introduce a tethered handset now (outside of an office setting), forget it. (Though I have to admit we recently bought one for our house, for $9 from Radio Shack, because we wanted an emergency phone for earthquakes…)
In the case of the Treo Pro, my take is that it is delivering well on the Basic and Performance Needs. In other words, it checks all the right boxes for what a smartphone needs to do at this point in time. But what it lacks (except for perhaps current Treo users, who are happy it exists at all) are “wow” factors like the iPhone’s touchscreen and gorgeous UI, or Android’s promise of endless developers, or the much lower price of some other smartphones. It’s not bad on anything, it’s just not outstanding.
And because this is its position on day of release, the market context will just get worse for it over time. The smartphone market is at an inflection point right now of shifting from niche to mainstream, and lots of competitors are going to start piling on. This will result in a quickening pace of exciters shifting to performance and basic. It happened quickly in the cellphone market (just as Motorola how much luck it had keeping up after the initial success of Razr), and will happen at least as quickly in smartphones.
So the Treo Pro is a good phone for right now. But Palm needs to get its skates on, because the clock is ticking.
palm, treo pro, iphone, smartphone, kano model, spinal tap, customer satisfaction, qfd | IN CATEGORIES... Technology, Business, Design, User Experience, Strategy, Innovation, Management Saturday, September 27 I’m always on the look out for examples of teams that perform well together to see what lessons I can pull out to help guide teams that I work on. Friday night at Austin City Limits, David Byrne and his band and dancers offered a nice example.
It was a great blend of uniformity (everyone wore white) and individuality (all the outfits were different and looked individually chosen for style and comfort).
There were set pieces of coordination such as the beginning of the song shown above, but much of the time the moves by the dancers seemed to be improv’d. This requires a lot of skill to do as they were on an unfamiliar stage, and obviously could just look uncoordinated if the performers weren’t very familiar with each other and could synchronize tightly or loosely as necessary. This is just like any project: you’ll have some things you can do by the book, others where you have to make it up. The important thing is to trust in your team-members’ skills and self-management abilities.
This video shows one of the more improv’d songs (sorry about the shaky camera):
While Byrne is clearly front and center both physically and conceptually, everyone had their moment to shine and were not made to feel slighted. A nice touch was that everyone came out at the end of the hour long set and did a theater-style bow, all stretched out holding hands at the edge of the stage soaking up the applause. Applause well-earned, as it was a great performance, and the audience (the “clients”) really responded.
And perhaps most important of all, everyone on stage was having a lot of fun. It’s maybe a bit hard to tell from these low-res videos, but there was lots of laughing a smiling, clearly they were enjoying themselves.
david byrne, talking heads, austin city limits, acl, youtube, dance, performance, team, collaboration, management | IN CATEGORIES... Culture, Management Monday, August 25 The always provocative Jamie Kitman, columnist for Automobile magazine amongst others, has a piece in the September issue calling out the Big Three automakers (or The Moderately Large Three, he demurs) for their decades long lack of responsiveness on the issue of fuel economy.
Game over. After almost half a century of fighting battles, America’s Big Three have at long last lost the war. Yes, it’s official. From this day forward, fuel economy matters… Too bad Detroit carmakers weren’t prepared. They only had fifty years to get ready.
Detroit didn’t have to encourage profligacy, it chose to. And some will argue that the power of advertising dollars could and should have been used to encourage efficiency. The American industry could have planned the same patriotic card it deployed following 9/11 to advocate fuel conservation instead of throwing around billions of dollars to make sure there were large SUVs in every garage. It didn’t have to spend some four decades fighting safety, emissions, and fuel-efficiency standards.
Clearly this is not just a down year, it’s a total paradigm shift… Cars that seemed like pretty good ideas suddenly seem less inspired. Cars that appeared bad ideas before now seem like the worst ideas ever. The Hummer brand, for instance, is on target to sell fewer than 35,000 units this year, or about twelve percent the number of Oldsmobiles GM was selling when it decided to shut that venerable brand to concentrate on…Hummer.
Strangely enough, while typing this up I’m listening to a Tivo’d recording of Charlie Rose’s interview with GM CEO Rick Wagoner. It’s a good interview, but obviously he gives quite a different perspective than Kitman (who points out that Wagoner got a 64% raise to $15.7M in 2007, despite GM’s heavy losses). And I can’t say that I can entirely blame the automakers for the large trucks. People bought them, and they didn’t buy small cars, for the most part, so the financial imperative in the near term was fairly clear.
But one thing Wagoner just said jumped out at me: he thinks the US government should get behind funding the startup costs for new energy sources, such as fuel cells and batteries, in order to kick-start the growth and innovation. But 15 minutes before he was bemoaning the role of governments outside the US supporting their domestic auto industries because it makes it unfair for competitors (i.e. GM) to compete. Seems to me that you can’t have it both ways though - either government intervention in helping domestic manufacturers get rolling in a new industry is OK, or it isn’t.
Related posts:
automotive, global warming, gm, rick wagoner, toyota, prius, green, electric car, chevy volt, fuel crisis, $4 gas | IN CATEGORIES... Business, Culture, Automotive, Sustainable Design, Management Wednesday, July 9 
As you have probably heard, Starbucks is going through its first ever round of large-scale layoffs, letting about 12,000 people go and shuttering 600 stores. Not surprisingly this is being blamed on $4+/gallon gas, the housing crisis, the credit crisis, and the general recessionary feel going around the economy. So sad news for those getting laid off, though schadenfreude for those who disparage the mass ubiquity of the brand.
$4 a gallon gas has forced many Americans to drive less, but the high price of gas is also causing many to change their spending habits all together. A new survey reveals that many Americans are cutting out small luxury in order to keep their car’s tank topped off.
A new study conducted by Kelly Blue Book finds that one in four people has cut out Starbucks completely from their morning routine, with another 21 percent greatly reducing their patronage of the coffee house.
But wait a minute, wasn’t Starbucks supposed to be recession-proof? If anything, it was supposed to do better during hard economic times because people would cut out on bigger luxuries like eating out, but they would increase purchases of mini luxuries like Venti Frappacinos because these made them feel good and cost relatively little. As one article has put it:
Wasn’t Starbucks supposed to be immune to economic ups and downs? That was always the investor argument made in favour of owning the company’s shares, and it was borne out during the U.S. recession that followed the dot-com collapse and 9/11. While most restaurants and retailers felt the squeeze as consumers scaled back, Starbucks’ latte-sipping well-to-dos kept coming back for more. That’s because, typically, luxury brands attract premium customers who are less sensitive to economic swings. They’ve got better job security and more disposable income to ride out the lows. When Starbucks continued to rack up impressive gains through 2002 and 2003, analysts went so far as to label the company “recession-proof.”
So which is it? Starbucks can’t have it both ways, either it’s recession-proof or it’s not.
But what the company offers has changed, or rather the way it offers it has changed. Service got worse, quality got worse, expansion happened too quickly and in an un-controlled way. I wrote a couple of years ago that Starbucks should be worried about how poor experiences happening at its periphery were affecting perceptions of its core stores:
Starbucks’ problem is that they are letting their experience get away from them at the peripheries: airports, corporate installations that “Proudly Brew Starbucks”, airlines, and so on. They are getting sloppy: the milk is too hot, the coffee brewed too weak or is burnt, espresso shots don’t have the punch, the counters are filthy and messy, the supplies aren’t stocked, the staff are impolite or poorly trained….
Perhaps [executives’] infatuation with new opportunities like selling CD’s at the stores and being in the movie business are distracting them from their core. Or perhaps their executives are not spending enough time really living the experiences they are selling, in all its variations. This happens a lot. I remember working with a wireless company a few years back where the executives used Blackberries instead of the phones the company was selling to customers at the time. They had no idea what actual customer experience they provided.
Starbucks stopped “eating its own dogfood” as the saying goes, or got so caught up in its own hype and self image that it lost track of the value that its customers actually put on what it was selling. And their rapid expansion actually lowered the perceived value by making it too commoditized and not special enough, as well as lowering the actual value because the quality got worse. Starbucks have now run smack into that limit.
Related posts:
Starbucks Should be Worried
Business, User Experience, Brand, Management